Melbourne's not-so-desperate housewives

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Residents of Wisteria Lane, Mount Dandenong, Kirrilee Sunderland, left, with her children Kye and Bailey, and neighbour Ingrid Meadows. FAR RIGHT: The women of the other Wisteria Lane 1%'We don't have time to get up to anything, we're just way too busy.'Photo: Paul Harris

There is some confusion in Melbourne's - more specifically Mount
Dandenong's - Wisteria Lane following the debut of the US show
Desperate Housewives, set in a street of the same name.

"It will be interesting to see what's under the pool," pondered
Ingrid Meadows of the first episode cliffhanger where a grieving
husband used a pick to dig for family secrets.

"On the show" has become a point of distinction and the way
these 30-something mothers finish many sentences.

Their picturesque street, a nursery propagation plot until the
early 1990s, shared the green foliage, a handful of pretty houses
and neat gardens with the US series, filmed on the set used in the
1989 Tom Hanks movie The Burbs. But its occupants were at pains to
point out there were more differences than similarities between the
two locales.

"Everyone I speak to says, 'So, you're one of those Desperate
Housewives'," Ms Meadows, mother of five children aged 2, 7, 10, 12
and 15, said. "But they're not feral like the ones on the
show."

"They're the good family," said Ms Sunderland of her neighbour.
"But they're not perfect like that nutter, the red-headed one on
the show."

With a small street full of young, happy, dual-parent families
the opportunities for steamy new relationships were pretty limited
too.

"There's no one that is single in our little street," Ms
Sunderland said. "There really isn't a whole lot of
possibilities."

"I'm not having any affairs," Ms Meadows said loudly to her
husband, David, who bore the tool belt but had a slightly
less-defined six-pack stomach than the show's resident plumber. "I
am, two doors down" he joked back.

"I don't think there's many secrets here," said Ms Sunderland,
who sells educational products from home and is the mother of two
young sons, Kye and Bailey, and teenage stepson, Josh. "We don't
have time to get up to anything, we're just way too busy."

"Imagine a whole series about our street. Bor-ing," Ms Meadows
said to her friend. "What's the most exciting thing that happens
here? Bushfires, I suppose. But not weird things. It's a fantastic
place to live."

"Your neighbours aren't right on top of you," agreed Ms
Sunderland. "You've got space and trees. People know of each other
but they're not busybodies. But why Wisteria Lane? Of any name,
they had to pick ours."